Anita Bryant: The Orange Juice Queen Whose War on Gay Rights Backfired
On 14 October 1977, Anita Bryant was sitting in front of the TV cameras at a press conference in Des Moines, Iowa, talking up her idea for centres where gay people could go to be cured, when a 27-year-old man stepped forward and pushed a banana cream pie into her face. Still dripping, the singer, beauty queen and orange juice pitchwoman cracked a joke, then started praying out loud for the man who'd just pied her. The clip went round the country and it's the moment most people remember. But it's only the middle of a much stranger story, about a woman who won the first big public battle against gay rights in America and then spent the rest of her life losing pretty much everything else.
Quick Answers
• Who was Anita Bryant? An Oklahoma-born pop singer, former Miss Oklahoma and the TV face of Florida orange juice who, in 1977, led the Save Our Children campaign against a gay rights law in Dade County, Florida.
• What did Save Our Children actually do? It forced a public vote on 7 June 1977 and won it, with around 69% of voters backing repeal of protections for gay people in housing, jobs and public services.
• Who threw the pie? Gay activist Thom Higgins, at a televised press conference in Des Moines on 14 October 1977.
• What happened to her career? The orange juice contract ended in 1980, the same year she divorced her husband and manager Bob Green. She later went bankrupt twice.
• When did she die? On 16 December 2024, at home in Edmond, Oklahoma, aged 84. Her family didn't make the news public until January 2025.
From Barnsdall to the Miss America Stage
Anita Jane Bryant was born on 25 March 1940 in her grandparents' house in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, although the family actually lived in Oklahoma City. The Oklahoma Hall of Fame, which inducted her in 1966 when she was just 26, says she was singing in her grandparents' church in Tishomingo before she'd turned four and gave her first operetta performance in first grade. She bounced between schools in Seminole, Velma-Alma and Midwest City before finishing at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa.
She was raised Southern Baptist, and church singing was where it all started. The postwar Bible Belt was full of kids performing for congregations, some more sincerely than others (the child evangelist Marjoe Gortner later admitted his whole act had been a con). Bryant's faith was the real thing, and that turned out to matter enormously. By 12 she'd won a talent contest on WKY-TV and taken over a half-hour Friday night programme that was eventually renamed The Anita Bryant Show.
In 1958 she was crowned Miss Tulsa and then Miss Oklahoma, and in 1959 she went to Atlantic City for Miss America. Exactly where she finished depends on who you ask. Most of her obituaries, including the one carried by the Post and Courier, say second runner-up, while the Oklahoma Hall of Fame has her down as first runner-up. Either way she didn't win, and it barely mattered, because the record labels came calling anyway.
Paper Roses, Bob Hope and the Sunshine Tree
Her 1959 debut produced a modest hit with "Till There Was You", and over the next couple of years she had three top 20 singles, "Paper Roses", "In My Little Corner of the World" and "Wonderland by Night", as the Baptist Report noted in its obituary. From 1961 she was a regular on Bob Hope's USO Christmas tours, entertaining American troops abroad. She sang at the White House for Lyndon Johnson, sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at his graveside in 1973 and performed at both the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1968. The Oklahoma Hall of Fame credits her with the national anthem at Super Bowl III in 1969, while The Advocate places her Battle Hymn performance at the 1971 Super Bowl, so she may well have done both.
One detail that rarely gets mentioned is how strict she was even at the height of her pop career. According to The Advocate, she refused to perform in venues that served alcohol. She also picked up three Grammy nominations, two for best sacred performance and one for best spiritual performance, for the album 'Anita Bryant... Naturally.'
On 25 June 1960, aged 20, she married Bob Green, a radio DJ who gave up his own career to manage hers. Their eldest son, Robert Green Jr, later told the Windy City Times that his father converted to Christianity around the time of the wedding and that it was effectively a condition of the marriage. The couple had four children: Robert, Gloria and twins William and Barbara.
Then in 1969 came the job that made her a household name. The Florida Citrus Commission hired her as its spokeswoman, and for the next decade she sang "Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree" in TV ads built around the slogan "A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine." She also fronted ads for Coca-Cola, Kraft, Holiday Inn, Tupperware and Phillips 66, and was reportedly making around $80,000 a year from commercials alone. Good Housekeeping readers repeatedly voted her one of the most admired women in the world. She was about as wholesome and safe as American celebrity got.
Dade County, January 1977
On 18 January 1977, the Metro Commission of Dade County, which covers Miami, voted 5 to 3 to add sexual and affectional preference to its anti-discrimination ordinance. It made Miami the first major American metro area to protect gay people in employment, housing and public services. Eight years after the Stonewall riots, it was a genuine milestone.
Here's the bit almost nobody mentions. The amendment was introduced by Commissioner Ruth Shack, whose husband Richard was Bryant's agent. The two women had been friends. That didn't stop Bryant testifying against the ordinance, and it certainly didn't stop what came next. Shack later said the hate mail and death threats she received were ferocious, a Miami retrospective on the fight recalled.
Bryant said her concern was the effect the law would have on Christian schools, including the ones her own children attended. She found a powerful ally in Miami's Archbishop Coleman Carroll, who urged Catholics to reject the ordinance, and opponents gathered enough signatures to force the whole thing to a public vote.
Save Our Children
Bryant's coalition was called Save Our Children, later renamed Protect America's Children, and the name told you everything about its pitch. The campaign's central claim was that gay people couldn't reproduce and so had to recruit children instead. HISTORY notes that Bryant painted gay adults as a direct threat to kids and argued that homosexuality was an abomination that didn't deserve legal protection. She also warned that if gay people got rights, prostitutes and other groups she disapproved of would be next. In one of her more notorious lines she described gay people as "human garbage", according to the AP.
Televangelist Jerry Falwell backed her. Flyers called the ordinance a blunder by Metro, and fundraising cards invited supporters to help Anita drag America back to God and morality. On the other side, campaigners handed out buttons that read "Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges".
Showbiz had a long history of punishing stars for being gay, or even for being suspected of it, which is why Liberace sued the Daily Mirror in 1959 rather than admit anything. What was new about the Bryant fight was the direction of travel. For once, a celebrity was about to pay a price for attacking gay people instead.
7 June 1977: The Landslide
After six months of campaigning, Dade County went to the polls on 7 June 1977. It wasn't close. Voters repealed the ordinance by roughly 69% to 31%, a margin of more than two to one, as both EBSCO's research summary and the LGLC archive record. Bryant had won, and she'd done it in the same spring that Studio 54 opened in Manhattan, a reminder of just how split the country's idea of the 1970s really was.
The victory had consequences far beyond Miami. That same year the Florida legislature, under pressure from the Save Our Children campaign, passed a law banning gay people from adopting children. By 2010, NPR pointed out, Florida was the only state with a specific ban on gay adoption written into law. It survived a federal appeals court challenge in 2004 and was only finally struck down by a Florida appeals court on 22 September 2010, in a case brought by Martin Gill, who'd fostered two young brothers for years. The state decided not to appeal, the Windy City Times reported.
Squeeze a Fruit for Anita
Bryant's win came at a cost she clearly hadn't seen coming. Gay rights groups launched a nationwide boycott of Florida orange juice. Gay bars stopped serving screwdrivers and started serving a drink called the Anita Bryant instead, while customers were urged to "squeeze a fruit for Anita."
She became a punchline. Saturday Night Live, Johnny Carson and Carol Burnett all went after her, the 1980 film Airplane! took a swipe and drag queens built entire acts around her. Songs by David Allan Coe, the Dead Kennedys and Jimmy Buffett mocked her too. When she was lined up for her own TV show, the sponsor, the Singer sewing machine company, pulled out.
In a 1980 interview with UPI she said the notoriety had cost her around $500,000 in TV contracts, bookings, expenses and threats. Her life, she said, had been turned upside down, a UPI report reprinted in the Michigan Daily recorded.
The Banana Cream Pie in Des Moines
By October 1977 Bryant was touring the country, encouraging other cities to follow Miami's lead. That's what brought her to Des Moines, and to Thom Higgins.
Higgins was 27, a gay activist from the Twin Cities who'd grown up across Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota. He'd been to a Catholic high school at Assumption Abbey in Richardton, North Dakota, then went to the University of North Dakota on a gifted student programme, where he helped run an underground paper called the Snow Job. That got him suspended in 1968. The ACLU of North Dakota goes further and credits him with coining the phrase gay pride, by pairing gay with pride, one of the seven deadly sins, as a riposte to the church. It's a hard claim to prove, and even the ACLU admits he's remembered almost entirely for the pie rather than the phrase.
The pie was banana cream, and pieing was a fashionable protest tactic at the time. Bryant's reply has gone down in history: "At least it's a fruit pie," she said, as Q Voice News recounted. Then she began praying aloud for Higgins to be delivered from his lifestyle, before breaking down in tears. Higgins raised his hands as if surrendering. Bryant said she didn't want him arrested. He told reporters afterwards that he'd done her a favour, because a pie was a lot kinder than a bullet.
Higgins went on to retrain as a nurse, qualifying in 1983, and co-founded the Positively Gay Cuban Refugee Task Force, which got Minneapolis's gay community to sponsor gay Cubans fleeing persecution. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1994, one of an entire generation of gay men lost before treatment caught up. In San Francisco around the same time, a waitress known as Brownie Mary was baking for men just like him.
Taking the Crusade National
Miami was only the start. In April 1978 Bryant was the best-known name behind a repeal drive in St Paul, Minnesota, against a gay rights ordinance that had been on the books for about four years. She didn't actually turn up. Her husband spoke in her place at a rally of around 8,000 repeal supporters, telling them "the doctors ordered us to cancel" her appearances, Minnesota Public Radio reported. Around 2,500 opponents marched from the Capitol to City Hall. On 25 April St Paul voted for repeal by more than two to one, MPR said on the night.
Wichita and Eugene followed, according to EBSCO's account of the period. In June 1978 she addressed the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta, while thousands of gay rights activists protested outside.
The real test came in California. State senator John Briggs put forward Proposition 6, which would have banned gay and lesbian people from working in the state's schools, and Bryant became its public face, the GLBT Historical Society notes. This time the tide turned. Harvey Milk campaigned hard against it, Governor Jerry Brown and President Jimmy Carter opposed it, and even Ronald Reagan came out against it. On 7 November 1978 Prop 6 was defeated by 58.4% to 41.6%, losing even in conservative Orange County. Three weeks later Milk was shot dead at San Francisco City Hall.
The Fall: Divorce, Bankruptcy and Branson
In 1980 the Florida citrus industry dropped Bryant as its spokesperson because of the controversy, ending an 11-year run. That same year she filed for divorce from Bob Green in Dade County Circuit Court. In a statement from her Miami Beach home she said he had "violated my most precious asset: My very conscience," and claimed he'd worked with staff to control her and use her name, the Michigan Daily's UPI report said. She also resigned from Anita Bryant Ministries.
The divorce was a big deal for a woman who'd built her public life on defending the traditional family. In a Ladies' Home Journal interview the same year she softened her line, saying people should live and let live, though she still didn't want homosexuality legalised or flaunted. Robert Green Jr, who stayed with his father after the split, told the Windy City Times in 2012 that the campaign hadn't caused the breakup but had "aggravated problems" that were already there. Bob Green died in January 2012, aged 80, and according to his son he blamed gay people for the collapse of both his career and his marriage until the end.
Bryant later spoke of struggling to provide for her children, of contemplating suicide and of becoming dependent on pills and wine, as The Advocate reported, citing The Washington Post. In 1990 she married Charles Hobson Dry, whom she'd dated in high school and who the AP describes as a former NASA test astronaut.
She tried to rebuild a stage career in the Ozarks, playing Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in the early 1990s before buying a theatre in Branson, Missouri, in 1995. In 1997 she and Dry filed for bankruptcy to reorganise around $10 million of debt, Roadside America noted. She moved her show, Anita with Love, to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, in late 1999, only to go bankrupt again in 2001. She was hardly the only star of the era's Christian entertainment boom to end up in financial ruin, as Jim Bakker's PTL empire proved spectacularly.
In 2006 she launched Anita Bryant Ministries International from Oklahoma, which offered so-called ex-gay therapy. She never really backed down. In 2011 she told The Oklahoman: "I've never regretted what I did," The Advocate reported.
The Granddaughter
There's a twist in the family story that almost writes itself. In 2021, Bryant's granddaughter Sarah Green, the daughter of Robert Green Jr, revealed on Slate's podcast One Year, hosted by Josh Levin, that she's gay and engaged to a woman. She'd come out to her grandmother on her 21st birthday.
Bryant's response, as Green told it, was to say she hoped her granddaughter would soon meet a husband, and to suggest that stronger faith would remind her she was really straight. Green said she was thinking of ringing her grandmother to ask whether she'd even want an invitation to the wedding, admitting "I genuinely do not know how she would respond," PinkNews reported. She said she felt sorry for Bryant more than anything.
What She Left Behind
Anita Bryant died of cancer at home in Edmond, Oklahoma, on 16 December 2024, aged 84. Her family didn't announce it until weeks later, in an obituary posted to The Oklahoman. Her second husband had died earlier that year. She left four children, two stepdaughters and seven grandchildren.
Miami-Dade's gay rights protections came back in 1998, when Commissioner Katy Sorenson's new ordinance passed by a single vote, 21 years after Bryant had them thrown out. In 2014 the law was extended to cover transgender and gender nonconforming people. Former Miami Herald reporter Steve Rothaus has described the county as ground zero for the modern gay rights movement, because the 1977 fight forced people from every background to speak up publicly for the first time.
That's the real legacy. Before Bryant, plenty of gay Americans had kept their heads down, the same survival instinct that state persecution, like the prosecution of Alan Turing in Britain, had drilled into people for decades. Her campaign dragged the issue onto prime-time TV and into every living room, and a generation of activists organised in direct response. As LGBTQ+ activist Tom Lander told the AP when she died, she won that campaign but lost the much longer battle.
Further Reading
If you want the full story of Miami 1977 and how one county vote shaped decades of American politics, Fred Fejes's Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America's Debate on Homosexuality is the most thorough account of the Bryant campaign and its fallout. It's properly researched without being dry.
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